Timely Meditations?: Oswald Spengler’s Philosophy of History Reconsidered
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Swer (2018)
3. Spengler as Positivist
The key support for a positivist interpretation is Spengler’s self-declared in- tention to furnish the reader with the laws of human history . The first line of the introduction to Decline reads, “(i)n this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untravelled stages in the destiny of a Culture” (Spengler 1926: 3) . Armed with his con- cept of cultures as organisms with a fixed lifecycle Spengler locates current Western civilisation at a particular stage of the recurrent pattern of cultural development and plots its future trajectory . He states that, “our own time represents a transitional phase which occurs with certainty under particular conditions, there are perfectly well-defined states (such as have occurred more than once in the history of the past) later than the present-day state of West europe”, therefore “(t)he future of the West is… but a single phenomenon of history, strictly limited and defined as to form and duration, which covers a few centuries and can be viewed and, in essentials, calculated from available precedents” (Spengler 1926: 39) . 4 History for Spengler becomes the analysis of past regularities in the development of cultures and the use of these regu- larities to predict the future . “(H)istory,” he claims, “offers possibilities far beyond the ambitions of all previous research, … namely, of overpassing the present as a research-limit, and predetermining the spiritual form, duration, rhythm, meaning and product of the still unaccomplished stages of our west- ern history” (Spengler 1926: 112) . Therefore, it is hardly surprising that some commentators should con- clude that Spengler is proposing what amounts to a science of history . Gar- diner describes Spengler simply as a “so-called ‘scientific historian’” (Gardiner 1952: 22) . Collingwood refers to Spengler’s outlook as “positivistic natural- ism” and his historical system as a “naturalistic science” (Collingwood 1961: evidence that Spengler used to support his system (Chisholm 1935, Santayana 1957, Walsh 1967, Berlin 2000, Kelley 2003) rather than its philosophical orientation . 4 Regarding Spengler’s use of the term ‘later’, Spengler holds that each culture follows a fixed sequence of developmental stages . Once one has identified which stage in the sequence Western civilisation currently occupies, one can then speak of ‘later’ stages in the cycle and of those stages in other historically prior cultures . As Spengler puts it, “I designate as contempo- rary two historical facts that occur in exactly the same – relative – positions in their respective Cultures” (Spengler 1926: 112) . In this way Spengler can speak of the Kantians and the epi- cureans, or Napoleon and Alexander as contemporaries . 142 Prolegomena 17 (2) 2018 181) . In addition to the search for general laws of history, and the desire to predict the future scientifically, Collingwood also identifies Spengler’s com- mitment to “external analysis” as “openly positivistic” (Collingwood 1961: 181–2) . even Hughes, one of Spengler’s most sympathetic critics who him- self favours the relativist interpretation of Spengler’s philosophy of history, concedes that, “many of his historical preconceptions were naively and una- shamedly positivist” (Hughes 1952: 55) . The positivist interpretation also receives considerable support from the tables in Decline which outline the supposed results of Spengler’s morphology of history . each table has a col- umn for Indian, Classical (Greco-Roman), Arabian and Western culture, and each table sets out chronologically the structurally isomorphic features of the spiritual, cultural and political development of each culture at each stage of the cultural lifecycle from Spring to Winter . The “ageing process”, as Dray puts it, follows an “identical pattern” in each culture and each stage in one culture has an “exact correspondence” with the equivalent stage in another (Dray 1980: 107) . Download 107.33 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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